DanielYKL

You don’t have to be a college graduate to know that worms, which devour organic matter and deposit “castings” that aerate and enrich soil, are good critters to have in a garden. So it makes sense that a college dropout and his partner used this common horticultural wisdom to develop TerraCycle, an organic liquid plant food derived from what the company affectionately refers to as “worm poop.”
      Tom Szaky(the dropout), 25, and Jon Beyer(who graduated in 2005), 24, were freshmen at Princeton University when they founded TerraCycle, Inc., in 2001. Today, the company cooks up close to 200 tons of worm poop a year in a 20,000-square-foot industrial building in Trenton, New Jersey. The result of this brewing process – similar to the methods a home gardener might use to create compost or manure tea – is an organic, nutrient-rich liquid fertilizer that, according to studies by Rutgers University, performs as well or better than more-popular commercial brands. Roughly a million bottles of TerraCycle fertilizer were shipped last year to store across North America.
      The seeds of TerraCycle were planted when Szaky, now chief executive officer, saw how well a friend’s houseplants flowered after they were fertilized with worm castings. Excited by the possibility of growing a business out of such prosaic raw material, he teamed up with Beyer, now chief information officer, to develop the initial product line and write a business plan. Their plan won several contests and prize money. With addition capital from “angel” investors, manufacturing and marketing of the product began in a Princeton basement.
      Growth for the company has been phenomenal – about 400 percent a year for several years running. In 2004, they abandoned the basement and moved into the Trenton factory. By 2008 they plan to expand into another building five times as large. But this is more than just another story of young entrepreneurs barely out of sneakers hitting the big time. TerraCycle bills itself as a new style of business: an “eco-capitalist” that makes money while having little or no negative impact on the environment.
      At the top of the long list of the company’s eco-friendly practices is packaging its products in reused soda bottles. The idea came of necessity: Before they attracted investors, Szaky and Beyer couldn’t afford to buy new bottles for their product, so they took empties from neighbours’ recycling bins and accepted donations of bottles from local organizations. Now the company purchases 20-ounce soda bottles from recycling centres for 2 cents each(compared to 5 cents for a new bottle, and 10 cents for those made of 100-percent recycled materials). Even after the bottles are cleaned, using a special washer loaded with eco-friendly detergent, Szaky says the cost is still less than buying them new. The company also buys bottles from school and charitable groups, using its Bottle Brigade program to both promote the products and encourage participants to learn more about the benefits of recycling.
      Besides the bottles, TerraCycle uses other materials usually considered candidates for the landfill. In the beginning, they fed their worms with waste from the Princeton dining halls. Now millions of worms, in four worm composting locations around the country, are fed waste from large-scale food-production processes, including the spent hops from beer-makers. The resulting worm castings are shipped tp Trenton for processing. The company tops its bottles with spray nozzles that other manufacturers have rejected, and most of its shipping boxes are rejects from other businesses as well. The company’s Trenton facility – which boasts a workforce of 50 during the peak bottling season – had been an abandoned newspaper distribution warehouse.
      This year the company will start marketing a potting soil mix ( package in recycled gallon-size milk jug) that incorporates the solid worm castings strained out after the fertilizer brewing process. Plans are also in the works to reuse the bottle cap in some way, perhaps as small packages for garden seeds.
       “One of the really exciting thing about TerraCycle is that we can save the world and make lots of money and make great products at the same time,” Szaky says. We’ve created a viable business by doing not just the right thing, but the best thing we cab possibly do.”
     
     
      

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 10:31 pm and is filed under VERMICULTURE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.